Name: Internet Scamming in Ghana
Uploaded: 2013-11-08T19:37:22.000Z
Duration: 20 min 31 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

We're in Ghana, the internet capital of Africa.

If you ever wonder what happens to computers that you

donate to one of those green e-recycling programs, this is

Kids from the north of Ghana come to this junkyard during

the summer to break computers down for scrap and also inhale

things that will probably end up giving them cancer of the

THOMAS MORTON: Most of the computers are only worth the

dollar or two of copper you can melt out of them.

But occasionally you harvest something useful, like a hard

drive or a processor, which you can sell at the little

flea market area next to the charnel grounds.

If you're an especially savvy shopper, you can actually put

together a full working computer here, one ready to

connect you to the fastest internet in all of Africa.

THOMAS MORTON: Ghana puts a lot of stock in computers.

Their internet is directly linked to Great Britain's, and

they are billboards all over the capital, extolling the

Ghana already is sort of the top dog of West Africa, where

most of its neighbors have been plagued by war and

poverty since independence, Ghana's had almost 50 years of

Right now they're hoping foreign investment will

bolster a computer industry here, which will permanently

make them the tech capital of West Africa.

So far it hasn't quite materialized, but what has

materialized is a thriving underground economy of fraud

THOMAS MORTON: Sakawa dates back to Nigeria's oil boom in

Ghanaians came into the country to take jobs in the

oil fields, and the locals taught them their favorite

The way it works is you write to someone in America or

England, tell them about an investment opportunity you

have, or just straight up ask them for money, and they send

Eventually the Nigerian government deported all the

Ghanaian guest workers back home, and they brought the

THOMAS MORTON: As the internet took hold in Ghana, the

Then scammers started hooking up with hackers online and

incorporating things like credit card fraud into their

We kind of like the idea of making a living off the back

American stupidity, so we hooked up with a Sakawa gang,

THOMAS MORTON: And now the term just gets used--

THOMAS MORTON: Sefa's a Sakawa success story.

He's used his old scam earnings to pay for business

school and has made a nice living for himself by Ghanaian

standards, although he still has to cross a stream of urine

Sakawa comprises any number of online scams, but the majority

One, you pretend you're a sexy girl, convince someone to fall

in love with you, and then they send you money.

The other one is, you use a stolen or forged credit card

Then you have it shipped to someone in the West who sends

These two scams sort of work like templates.

Once you nail down the basics of them, you can start

combining them and adding all sorts of personalized details

until your mark feels like he's in the middle of some

elaborate international business scheme and not just

emailing back and forth with an African kid on a laptop.

The thing with Sakawa is while it's essentially free money,

To find someone gullible enough to fall for your

shtick, you have to spend hours and hours emailing

hundreds and thousands of random addresses.

THOMAS MORTON: In America, frustrated gamblers will kiss

a lucky penny or pray to Saint Bernardino for help.

Likewise, frustrated Sakawa boys turn to religion when

Only in their case, turning to religion means driving out

THOMAS MORTON: I'm definitely in Africa right now.

Juju is the local term for what fancy anthropology types

In the same way that Hinduism is actually more or less a

collection of thousands of local deities and rituals,

juju is basically an umbrella for any West African religious

Subtitles ListPlay Video

Internet Scamming in Ghana

music

Internet

email

money